For the past month or so, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading first round applications for the First Cut Film Series, our competition to find the top five film students in the country, then to finance, produce and theatrically release each of their first feature films.

And, to be honest, I’d begun to have some doubts. Not because of any problems with the applications themselves, but because of how much they, in this first round, still leave to the imagination. A short synopsis, a couple of bios (director, writer, producer), and a few pages of screenplay isn’t a lot to go on.

Of course, that was the point of the round: an attempt to initially separate the wheat from the chaff. Still, without any of the directors’ work to screen until round two, I’ve had no real idea whether any of them can make movies that feel like real movies, rather than like student theses, and I’d started to fear the worst.

Today, however, I spent several hours screening graduate student shorts as one of the judges for NYU Film School’s Wasserman Awards, their top honor for outstanding achievement in film*. And, in short, I was blown away. Sure, some of the stuff was exactly the sort of amateur-hour crap I’d feared. But at least two or three of the films were so astoundingly good that the judges actually clapped once they ended.

When the lights came up after one, another of the judges said, ‘shit, somebody needs to give this guy a million bucks and tell him to just go make a feature.’

Which is good, considering that’s basically what we’re about to do.

*[Side story: as past Wasserman winners include Ang Lee and Spike Lee, I went in looking for any other Lee’s who might have a leg up. There weren’t any, though there was a Jennifer Li, and while I won’t give away anything before NYU announces the awards, I will say her short was definitely in the top five.]